Joan Seliger Sidney grew up with parents who barely escaped the Holocaust, unlike her grandparents and other relatives who did not.
Those forebears and her family’s hometown of Zurawno, Poland, have been at the heart of many of her poems. She is the author of three books, has had work in some of the country’s finest journals, and is the recipient of many awards and honors.
Sidney is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. In addition, she facilitates “Writing for Your Life,” an adult workshop. She lives with her husband of 52 years in Storrs and they have four children and six grandchildren.
— CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin
INHERITANCE
Zurawno, Poland, where Mom grew up:
The coal stove in the kitchen, brick
oven big enough for her mama
to bake wheat bread, challah, rugelach
to feed her family of nine all week.
The chestnut table doubling
as the goose-down feather bed
where Mom and her sister Luba slept.
The barn behind the house, the cow
her sister Minka milked morning and night.
The eggs Mom picked up from the sixteen hens
she gave grain, named, and refused to eat,
not even in Shabbos soup.
The outhouse in the woods
she wouldn’t use on icy days and nights.
Her brother Julik’s hickory skis
she borrowed, ropes threaded
through holes and tied to her boots;
the Carpathian trails she crisscrossed,
the cheese and chocolate she stopped to eat.
The Dniester, where Srulik, Julik’s best friend,
taught her the European breaststroke,
her head high above water.
Her blue eyes that speared him for life.
Their courtship off and on: Gymnasium in Lwow
for her, law studies in Krakow for him.
This pink heart-shaped diamond engagement ring
Dad slipped on Mom’s fourth finger,
at home today on mine.
WHY MY MOTHER CAN’T SPEAK YIDDISH
“I know,” Mom tells me, “when they were alone
Papa and Mama spoke Yiddish
like the other old Zurawno
Jews. But although I know a few
words like Papa’s Du host genug gekvetsht!
whenever one of us seven children
complained too much, in our home we spoke
Polish. Not to have a Yiddish
accent, Mama said. When I asked,
what’s an accent and why was it bad,
she looked me hard in the eyes
and took both my hands. I felt chills
and squeezed tight, wishing
I could pull those questions back
into my mouth. Christ killers,
the Poles call Jews. But if you speak
real Polish, with no accent,
they won’t know and you’ll be safe.
“Mama pulled me tight
against her chest. Barely could I breathe
but who cared? At night I listened
to Mama and Papa’s Yiddish
whispers slip through our wall
like Rozinkes mit Mandlen
lullabying me to sleep.”
“Some story, Mom! Makes me
want to learn Yiddish.”
I take her spotted hands, kiss
her wrinkled cheeks, inhale her scented
breath: baked apples, cinnamon, Sanka.
LEAVING
Why do you say you escaped
Mother, when you are still
trapped among their bones?
How many have you dragged
into your Holocaust past?
Every day you are back in Poland.
Every day the Ukrainian peasants
shoot your parents and push them into the ground
you never found. Every day
someone scratches the earth for treasures
they buried behind the outhouse.
Babi Yar you say over and over.
Though you mean Zurawno, your world
so small, every town becomes Zurawno.
MALKA AT NINETY
In Yiddish, your name means queen.
“Too hard to go to the beauty parlor,”
you have let your crown go
from gold to silver for the first time
since 1945, when after twenty-five months
you emerged from hiding.
Until you and Uncle Munio emigrated
and moved in across the street,
my parents refused to speak Polish.
“You’re Jews, not Poles,”
the government told them.
I hated those rough, guttural
sounds I couldn’t understand.
I wanted, like you, to belong
to both worlds: Flatbush,
where Coney Island and the Brooklyn Dodgers
were a nickel’s subway ride away;
and the shetl, where Zisl played his violin
in the street below your steps.
How did you survive
those twenty-five months, in a cellar
below the cellar of a house? Thirty-five
Jews in a space designed for twelve.
How did you breathe without a single inhalation
of fresh air? Endure without a second of sunlight?
What did you eat when the rats
stole your stockpiled flour, barley, kasha?
Late Sunday afternoons on East 2nd Street,
you’d bribe me with your fox-head stoles
to behave, letting me find them in your bedroom drawer.
We’d pretend your evergreen bedspread was the forest
where they stalked. After dinner, you’d pile
my plate with rogeloch, and thumb-print
cookies filled with strawberry jam, powdered
sugar sprinkled on top.
Today I sit in your living room of twenty-five years,
on the twelfth floor, Miami Beach.
How many years since you touched
your oven? These days I bake
your honey cake, laced with whiskey
and walnuts. Laila, your Jamaican caretaker,
brews tea. Her name means night.
She blares “Days of Our Lives”
as we try to talk.
“Starosc nie radosc,” at the elevator door
you whisper. “Old age is no pleasure.”
PANTOUM FOR MY GRANDPARENTS
On Yom Kippur I wrote my first Holocaust poem
instead of returning to synagogue to pray.
The grandmother I never knew put her
hands on my shoulders and told me her story.
Instead of returning to synagogue to pray,
back to Zurawno I journeyed with Grandma.
Hands on my shoulders, she told me her story:
“Germans, so cultured, won’t hurt us old Jews.”
Back to Zurawno I journeyed with Grandma.
We watched the road darken with soldiers.
“Germans, so cultured, won’t hurt us old Jews.
From us, our Ukrainian neighbors rent.”
We watched the road darken with soldiers.
Grandpa wore his Silver Cross from World War I.
“From us, our Ukrainian neighbors rent.”
If, only instead of listening, I’d whisked them away.
Grandpa wore his Silver Cross from World War I.
Grandma braided challah and slid it in the oven.
If, only instead of listening, I’d whisked them away
before the betrayal by their Ukrainian neighbors.
Grandma braided challah and slid it in the oven.
She braised brisket and potatoes, my mouth watered
before the betrayal by her Ukrainian neighbors.
They beat and bloodied Grandma and Grandpa.
She braised brisket and potatoes, my mouth watered.
Granddaughter from the future, what could I do?
Neighbors beat and bloodied Grandma and Grandpa,
threw their still-breathing bodies into a pit for Jews.
FLEEING
God knows where they’re going
in this photo by Josef Koudelka,
this stream of refugees caught by camera
almost in a pose. Up front, the family
dog, white chest and forelegs, regal
and high as a Weimaraner, pulls
the two-wheeled cart, his withers yoked.
The child, awkwardly balanced on a bundle
of clothes, struggles to stay seated.
Like sticks beating his back, sacks
stuffed with pans, pots, potatoes, barley—
everything his parents could fit
in this quick exodus—shift and hit.
Alongside, his mother in her everyday
dress and shawl, his father in his peaked
wool cap stare straight ahead, not daring
to blink at the camera, trying not to see
black boots, Kalashnikovs blocking the border.
COUSIN
Jan Rybak, the tiniest man
in his village, opens his attic
to a man and his eight-year-old
daughter, her mother killed
while fleeing camp. He shares
his potatoes, ignores the law:
death to any Christian
and his family that helps a Jew.
When Nazi soldiers drag
a teenage girl over cobblestones,
her legs bloody, her dress
shreds, the crowd shrieking
“Jude! Jude!” Jan Rybak
grabs her hand, hoists her up
into his buggy. Her eyes wide
with disbelief. “She’s not a ‘Jude,'”
he shouts to his townspeople.
“She’s my cousin.”
A BIELSKI PARTISAN SPEAKS
Victory means each day
we stay human. Steal
only to eat, take from farms
rich in potatoes and turnips;
not from farmers starving
like us, fields stripped, barns
burned, cows, pigs, chickens
slaughtered by Germans. Deep in the forest
in darkness we cook our soup, the black
pot hangs from a branch, fire blazes
below. Safe for a few hours, no Germans
brave enough to enter the night forest.
Still we sleep dressed, ready
to flee our temporary tents
of tree leaves and limbs. What
a strange collection of runaway
Jews, our Bielski otriad! Old
people, young men and women,
children. To Tuvia Bielski,
who leads us on his horse
like a meteor, everyone is welcome.
Some younger men disagree, fear
for food, want revenge. “Feel free
to leave,” Tuvia tells them. “Better
to save one Jew than to kill twenty
Germans.” Not so for Belorusian peasants
who catch fleeing ghetto Jews,
keep them freezing in storage
rooms overnight, tie them up
like sheep, and sell them to the police.
With their own guns, Tuvia shoots them
and their families. On their farm doors,
in Russian he writes: Death to Nazi
Collaborators. Now they know
we Jews, too, can fight. Our otriad
grows to a forest shtetl, our own Jerusalem.
July 1944: our exodus stretches almost
two kilometers—scouts on horseback, marching
fighters, horse-drawn carts for the sick,
a herd of cows, a celebration of survivors.
ON APPROACHING SEVENTY
Watching the hands of my son
kneading challah dough
on the maple cutting board
in my kitchen, a memory
rises of my mother
bending over our kitchen table
in Flatbush, pressing, stretching,
folding flour, water, eggs
into a living elastic.
Sometimes in my dreams, Mom
appears, whispers of her mother
in her kitchen in Zurawno
in the pre-dawn dark,
by the light of the kerosene
lamp, pulling and pushing
the yeasty challah dough
until my son covers it
with a clean white cloth
and leaves it in the warm
electric oven to rise.
Poems copyright 2017 by Joan Seliger Sidney. CT Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin selects work for CT Poets Corner by invitation.
